How sad is it that I haven't posted in nearly a year? Pretty sad. I'll finish those Japan trip reports sometime! =\ Anyway!!

WE ARE FULL! Thank-you everyone!!Holy crud! It's time for Bro Calendar signups! This'll be our 7th Bro Calendar. Oy oy, I'm feeling old here… As is now the norm, the quidelines are practically the same as they are every year.

The Bro Calendar is a 12-month calendar that features that special, awesome relationship between two (or more!) people that may or may not be related. Think Jet and Spike from Cowboy Bebop. Or Vash and Wolfwood from Trigun. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Those sorts of relationships. This calendar is to celebrate characters being bros. You can see the 2016 calendar here.

Technical Details:-Image should be at least 8.5"x11" (landscape, NOT portrait!) and the resolution should be AT LEAST 300ppi. -Due date is Friday, November 11th. -Color is preferred, but shaded greyscale is acceptable too. -PG-13 max, please!

Any groups of FICTIONAL characters are allowed! It doesn't matter if they are from an anime series, manga, video game, American comic, TV show, etc, etc. They're all okay. And gender DOES NOT MATTER. Sure, it's a "bro" calendar, but female characters are DEFINITELY allowed. You are free to draw characters used in previous Bro Calendars, but please do not draw characters that are already being used for the 2015 calendar. If possible, I'd like to have only one page per series (so, not like three months of One Piece characters, even if they're all different characters), but I won't stop anyone from signing up for a series that is already being used as long as the characters are different!

I cannot pay you, but for your effort and troubles, you will be sent a copy of the calendar. You DO NOT have to live in the United States to participate, I will happily send you a calendar whatever country you live in. And your images are your own, please feel free to use it for prints at Artist Alleys or the like! (I do not make money off of this project, any money gained from these sales will go directly to recuperating printing costs. In the off chance that I make enough to cover costs, the profits will go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.)

If you would like to participate, please comment on this entry with the following:-Characters you want to draw and series they are from-Month you'd like to claim (NOT NECESSARY)-How you'd like me to contact you (usually I will try to reach everyone through LJ PMs, but if you'd prefer email or a Twitter DM, let me know!)

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave me a comment here, send me a LJ PM, a message on twitter (@kaitou_ace), or email me at dragynstorm (at) gmail (dot) com. I will be trying to remain in contact with all participants, giving updates and reminders on due dates.

I'm a bit late on this this time around but… it's time for signups for the sixth Bro Calendar! As usual, most of this is copy-paste from previous years as not much has changed, but if you're interested, please glance over everything to make sure you're clear on guidelines!

The Bro Calendar is a 12-month calendar that features that special, awesome relationship between two (or more!) people that may or may not be related. Think Jet and Spike from Cowboy Bebop. Or Vash and Wolfwood from Trigun. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Those sorts of relationships. This calendar is to celebrate characters being bros. You can see the 2015 calendar here.

Technical Details:-Image should be at least 8.5"x11" (landscape, NOT portrait!) and the resolution should be AT LEAST 300ppi. -Due date is Friday, November 13th. -Color is preferred, but shaded greyscale is acceptable too. -PG-13 max, please!

Any groups of FICTIONAL characters are allowed! It doesn't matter if they are from an anime series, manga, video game, American comic, TV show, etc, etc. They're all okay. And gender DOES NOT MATTER. Sure, it's a "bro" calendar, but female characters are DEFINITELY allowed. You are free to draw characters used in previous Bro Calendars, but please do not draw characters that are already being used for the 2015 calendar. If possible, I'd like to have only one page per series (so, not like three months of One Piece characters, even if they're all different characters), but I won't stop anyone from signing up for a series that is already being used as long as the characters are different!

I cannot pay you, but for your effort and troubles, you will be sent a copy of the calendar. You DO NOT have to live in the United States to participate, I will happily send you a calendar whatever country you live in. And your images are your own, please feel free to use it for prints at Artist Alleys or the like! (I do not make money off of this project, any money gained from these sales will go directly to recuperating printing costs. In the off chance that I make enough to cover costs, the profits will go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.)

If you would like to participate, please comment on this entry with the following:-Characters you want to draw and series they are from-Month you'd like to claim (NOT NECESSARY)-How you'd like me to contact you (usually I will try to reach everyone through LJ PMs, but if you'd prefer email or a Twitter DM, let me know!)

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave me a comment here, send me a LJ PM, a message on twitter (@kaitou_ace), or email me at dragynstorm (at) gmail (dot) com. I will be trying to remain in contact with all participants, giving updates and reminders on due dates.

Thank-you for your interest and time!

Months available: Currently ALL MONTHS are available! The cover is open as well if you are interested in drawing that!

It's been over three months since I got back from the latest Japan excursion and I'm finally getting around to posting. There are reasons for this!! Good reasons!! …the most prominent one being that I'm very, very lazy. But enough about that, ON WITH THE PICTURES!

Suddenly it's Summer and that means... Yes! It's time for signups for the fifth Bro Calendar! Wow, I can't believe this is the fifth one. Yikes, time goes by so fast! Most of this is copy-paste from previous years as not much has changed, but if you're interested, please glance over everything to make sure you're clear on guidelines!

The Bro Calendar is a 12-month calendar that features that special, awesome relationship between two (or more!) people that may or may not be related. Think Jet and Spike from Cowboy Bebop. Or Vash and Wolfwood from Trigun. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Those sorts of relationships. This calendar is to celebrate characters being bros. You can see the 2014 calendar here.

It's been a while since I posted doodles. The last year or so has been pretty busy, so I haven't been drawing all that much. I've been drawing a lot of World Trigger stuff because it's my beloved baby, but maybe I'll just post most of that stuff together later. It's very silly stuff.

At the beginning of the year I went to see How to Train Your Dragons Live and had a super great time. I left the show wanting my own giant animatronic dragons, but that's a little… beyond me, so I decided instead to make some small dragons and cosplay as Hiccup at San Diego Comic Con.

I wanted Nur to cosplay with me and he eventually agreed and we went as Book!Hiccup and Movie!Hiccup. (I was going to be Movie!Hiccup and I tried to get him to cosplay Astrid, but for some reason he refused. Huh.) This post is going to show how I flailed around for ages and eventually created two small dragons to carry around as we cosplayed.

Every big cosplay project I work on I'm trying to take pictures of so people can see how I did things and learn from my successes and avoid my mistakes. This post includes how I made my Jack Frost staff, my Maou pauldrons, and my first set of Maou horns.

Yeeeeeesh, it's been forever. I've had all these things I've wanted to post about, but I wanted to post a bunch of photos with them and I've been super lazy lately and didn't want to sort/resize/etc them. And I kept telling myself that I shouldn't post until I posted about older things, but I'd never post older things, and it's been this terrible cycle of never posting. Gah.

Life has been good. Busy, but good. Went to Japan Expo USA at the end of August, had a great time (will probably post later on it, hahaha). Been playing lots of Tales of Xillia and doodling something for every day I play it. I've been posting them to my twitter, but I'll post them all here too once I finish the game (I'm pretty close to the end now). Nur proposed and I accepted, so we'll get married at some point. Nur and I went to Hawaii at the end of October to attend the wedding of Melissa, my bestest Poké Pal. I had a blast, and there will definitely be lots of pictures from that later. Halloween was lots of fun, had a great time stalking around my parents' place, then hanging out with Minna no Anime people over the weekend in SLO for the MnA party.

FIRST THINGS FIRST. Still looking for Bro Calendar participants!! Guys, I'm getting desperate now!! I'll now take pre-drawn images, as long as they fit the theme and size requirements, and haven't been in a previous Bro Calendar! You can also do multiple entries! You'll get an additional copy of the calendar (or any in-print manga volume of your choice) for each additional calendar!

Okay, now, other things. This is only over a month after the convention, hahahahaha…

It has been FAR too long since I made a proper LJ post. I meant for this post to be about Comic Con, but that's only half-written and I don't have the energy to finish it tonight.

But yeah, went to Comic Con a couple weeks back and had a great time, but I'll ramble for pages and pages about that in another post. The weekend before that, my brother, dad, Nur, and I went to an A's game vs the Red Sox. Great game, the A's won, had great seats, everything was great. Except that we left like an hour later than I wanted and missed out on the giveaway for the game; a Reddick jersey replica. Reddick is my favorite A's player, I wanted that, boooo. My dad told me I could leave early to get one, but I wanted to go as a family, so… bah. Oh well, I can make my own or something.

The day after the game was my dad's birthday and it just happened that my uncle and aunt from SoCal were staying at my parents' place that night on their way to Seattle! We had a nice dinner with lots of pleasant conversation.

Last week Nur kindly took me to a local jewelry shop… to get my A's hat signed by Eric Sogard! Because for some reason he was signing there? He's really cute and seems nice and now my hat has a nifty signature on it! The next day we went to the J-Pop Summit in J-Town and participated in the Real Escape Game which we TOTALLY WON (along with like 600 other people BUT STILL, we've never won/escaped before). Saw awesome people there too, and it was generally just awesome.

Uhhh what else has been going on… oh! The always lovely Jump crew was kind enough to let me join them on last week's (7/29's) Shonen Jump podcast! I give terrible opinions and advice! I'll also be on the next episode (8/5's), because I happened to be in the office that day, but I'm still terrible in it, so yeah. But I did get to talk a bit about two books I worked on that are coming out on 8/6 (Nura 16 and Tegami Bachi 14) and say a few words about Ayatsuri Sakon. The awesome editor for Blue Exorcist is on the 8/5 podcast too, with some great Blue Exorcist discussion. The podcasts talk about the current Jump issue, so beware of spoilers!!!

I went to visit Viz on Friday and ended up coming home with a box of books because I'm a manga loverhoarder. It was like 30lbs and I had to drag it from about Pier 39 to the Embarcadero BART station which is… pretty far if you're trying to lug around a box of manga. Nur came to my rescue and ended up carrying it the last four or five blocks to the BART station and then from our stop to his car. T^T~♥ Like I told him in my plea-text for help, my eyes are much bigger than my muscles. Then we came home to three big boxes from RightStuf, a bajillion books from like… four different HUGE orders from the last three or four months. It was manga madness in our apartment, got something like 125 new volumes in total yesterday. Where the hell will I put all these? At least right now I feel pretty satisfied with all my manga… stuff. Like there's nothing nagging in the back of my head, reminding me to pick up this or that. I should have pretty much everything I follow preordered for the next few months and hopefully I should be able to avoid any major orders or manga splurging.

Oh, I also got the Tsuritamas BluRays in from Sentai yesterday. Love dem fishing boys. SPEAKING OF WHICH! Anyone want to cosplay Haru from Tsuritama at Japan Expo USA? We have a Yuki, a Natsuki, and an Akira (with Tapioca!!), but no Haru yet. =(

I'm also trying to finish up John Doe from Dream Eater Merry for Japan Expo USA, but I'm sorta thinking I'll just take it slow and wear it for Minna no Anime's Halloween Party? Ehhhh… I haven't decided.

Went to another A's game today, another lovely game, but I slept terribly the night before and the sun during the game sapped my energy. And I also got sunburned, lol.

It's been sorta busy lately, but in a fun way. Good times.

THIS PART IS IMPORTANT!The Bro Calendar 2014 is still looking for participants! Please sign up! Tell your friends!

Sorry about the radio silence! Things have been VERY busy. Been prepping for Comic Con. Hopefully I'll have a bit more down time when I return from the convention (probably not because I'll be putting together two costumes for Japan Expo at the end of August hahahaha).

But yeah, heading down to Comic Con. Here are the panels I'm interested in. There are a lot and I'm not entirely sure of my schedule, but the things I'm definitely planning on at least TRYING to go do are in bold.

This whole con will be How to Train Your Dragon cosplay con for me. On Thursday, Nur will be in Movie!Hiccup and I'll be in Book!Hiccup, Friday I'll be in my Toothless hoodie, and Saturday I'll be in Book!Hiccup again. Sunday we'll probably skip the convention and go to Book-Off instead. Not entirely sure yet. As Hiccups, we'll have dragons with us… a Terrible Terror and a baby Nadder. So please say hi if you see us! And if you're attending and have evenings free, maybe we could get a group together for dinner or something? I dunno.

Hello friends, it's that time again! It's time for signups for the fourth Bro Calendar! If you've participated before, the big things are all the same. You can see the 2013 calendar here.

The Bro Calendar is a 12-month calendar that features that special, awesome relationship between two (or more!) people that may or may not be related. Think Jet and Spike from Cowboy Bebop. Or Vash and Wolfwood from Trigun. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Those sorts of relationships. This calendar is to celebrate characters being bros.

Fanime starts tomorrow and while packing my costumes, I realized I never posted anything on LJ from my last photoshoot from last November, lol. So I finally picked out the ones I liked.

But before that! Fanime! I'll be there the whole time! I'm working during the con and I don't know my hours, so I don't know how much hang out time I'll have, but hopefully I'll be free in the evenings! We'll see! If you want to hang out, send me a text! If you don't have my number, let me know and I'll DM it to you. Let's have fuuuun. =D

Mentioned it last post, but things have been pretty busy what with work being busy and conventions right around the corner. But things are going alright! It's stressful, but fulfilling at the same time!

So Fanime is less than three weeks away. This may not be my final costume list, but most are pretty firm: ->Colonial Jack Frost (Rise of the Guardians) - The outfit is almost done, but I won't be able to do any of the frost embroidery on anything until after Fanime. It should be done for Comic Con. I hope. I still have a lot to do on the staff and in all likelyhood it'll end up a huge mess, but it lights up by my touch! So at least it'll have that going for it. And also I might electrocute myself with it. WHOOPS. I'm working on measures to prevent that. Ugh, and I have the wig to do too. Lots and lots of work to do with the wig. @_@->Jacuzzi (Baccano!) - He's been done for ages, but I'm redoing the lining of his vest, so I gotta make sure to get that done before I forget. Again.->Sadou Maou (Hataraku Maousama)- Super super excited about this costume, actually. I still need to make the MgRonald patches, make his horns, seal the pauldrons, make his cape, and style his wig, but he's getting close to being done. I probably won't have the MgRonald embroidery on his shirt or hat for Fanime because I'm not going to rush it myself and because the local embroidery place hasn't gotten back to me, grrrrr. But oh gosh, I think this costume is going to be a lot of fun.->Inga (Un-Go) - He's done, but I might touch up his wig. Not sure if I'll bring him or not.->Yuki Sanada (Tsuritama) - He's done, but I don't know if I'll bring him either, pretty much because I'd have to bring his fishing pole, and I don't know how the prop load will be yet. And I want to make a Hemingway apron, but I don't think I'll have time to get it done before Fanime.